A Killing Night mf-4

by Jonathon King

  "Yeah, I suppose it was. But how did this information come to your attention?"

  "O'Shea called me," she said, flat and matter-of-fact.

  "You're kidding," I said, spinning the conversation I'd just had with O'Shea.

  "He was concerned about you. He thought you were working something that was going to get you into trouble on his account and he said he didn't want to be responsible. He said he figured that I should know the truth before the facts got twisted around to suit the uniforms."

  "The truth?" I said.

  "Meet me over in the covered parking lot at the Galleria at two, under the west side," she said. "It's raining like hell down here."

  I told her I would be there by two, as soon as I checked on another client. It was still only gray here. The clouds were heavy and had not yet opened up but I could hear the surf beginning to slash at the beach as the wind increased. The fronds of the rubber plants and white birds of paradise that sheltered each bungalow were clacking and the smell of salt and flotsam was thick in my nose when I came around the corner and stopped.

  The door to Billy's hideaway was standing open. There was a light glowing somewhere behind the front window. Probably the one over the sink in the kitchen, I thought, putting the layout together in my head while I squinted and tried to pick up any movement inside. I stepped closer to the sea grape tree next to me and knelt with one knee in the sand. The wind swung the door a foot more and I could now see a bar stool on the floor and the small dining area light was missing from its spot suspended above the table, only a bare cord left hanging in the air. I was unarmed. My 9mm was back at the shack, wrapped in its oilskin cloth where I had retired it.

  Don't jump to conclusions, I told myself, and then got up and took a couple of steps closer, listening through the rumble of the ocean and wind. There was still no movement from inside. I looked around for neighbors but the weather had sent most people indoors.

  On the flat concrete stones that started a path in front of the patio I picked up on a trail of dark droplets and one didn't have to be a CSI to recognize blood, and that's when I moved faster. At the door I peered around the corner. The front room had been tossed and glass and half a bulb from the hanging light lay shattered in one corner. The blood trail led to the couch and joined a stain there that formed the shape of Italy in the fabric. I was about to step all the way in when the panicked voices of women came from behind me in the wind.

  "Help! Somebody help him!"

  I turned and jogged toward the beach and saw three women, one with children huddled into her skirts, waving their arms and pointing out to sea.

  I had my shirt off by the time I hit the railing of the bulkhead and then used the top rung to swing over and down. I kicked my Docksides off after landing in the sand and I was honing in on a splotch of yellow that was bobbing fifty yards out. The shape expanded at the top of a crest to something human and then disappeared on the backside of the wave and a prayer seemed to bring it back to the surface again.

  I hurdled the first three waves and then launched myself like a spear down into the next one, grabbed a handhold of the bottom sand, pulled myself into a crouch and used my legs to launch again. Each time I dolphined I tried to catch a breath and a glimpse of the yellow shirt. Sometimes I got one, sometimes the other.

  When it got too deep I started to freestyle, looking forward each time a wave picked me up to the top of a crest. It didn't take long to close in on the shirt. When I got to within ten yards I could see it was Rodrigo, one side of his face a pale white, the scarred half an angry red. But his eyes were still wide and he was flapping with one arm, trying to stay on top in the oxygen while the white water tried to drown him. I went to a breast stroke and got into the same swell with him and yelled his name. There was no recognition in his face but he saw hope and grabbed for it.

  I'd learned enough about water rescues to keep a struggling swimmer off your body. If you let them get a choke hold, you were both going down. I grabbed his wrist when he reached for me and held him at arm's length.

  "OK Rodrigo!" I yelled. "You're OK, you're OK!"

  I was looking to find his other arm when a wave broke over both our heads. While we were under I reached for his other arm and held it. When we both cleared the white water Rodrigo was screaming in pain like he'd been hooked with a sharp barb and I realized the arm I'd grabbed was hanging limp.

  "Broke, Mr. Max! Broke, broke," he spit out, his face twisted in agony and I let go of the arm.

  "OK, OK. Let me pull you, Rodrigo. Let me pull!"

  He may have understood me or maybe he went into shock but I was able to hook him under the pit of his good arm and turn his back so it was on my hip and I began sidestroking for shore. The waves had no rhythm and in the white water it felt like all I was doing was pulling at air bubbles and getting nowhere. I was breathing heavily and trying to scissor kick each time a wave pushed us, and then I'd rest when it left us bogged down in the swell. It seemed like thirty minutes and I started counting strokes to give myself a goal.

  In the middle of my second count to fifty I felt my right foot touch the ocean floor and the next wave pushed both of us onto solid sand. I struggled with Rodrigo's sudden weight and then heard yelling, "We got you, man! We got you!" and we were suddenly surrounded by hands and arms and other bodies in the water around us.

  "Watch his arm, watch his arm, it's broke," I said as two men took Rodrigo from me and I felt another strong arm around my own waist.

  "Oh, shit, man and his leg, too, watch his leg, man!" another voice said.

  On the beach there was a red-and-white rescue truck with a red gumball light spinning on its roof and the lifeguards lay Rodrigo down in the lee side out of the wind and had me sit beside him. The little Filipino had an unnatural lump in the side of his arm where his bicep should have been and from the thigh of his left leg a stark white splinter of bone was protruding, blood trickling from the gash and mixing with the water and running a spiderweb of red down through the hair on his leg. One of the guards wrapped a blanket around the leg and someone draped one over my shoulders.

  While my heartbeat tripped down I heard the sound of a siren growing and two of the guards brought out a backboard, strapped Rodrigo onto it, and then carried him to the street end, where an ambulance was backing up to the bulkhead. After they took him away a guard crouched down next to me. It was Amsler, the guard whose chinning bar I used.

  "You want a ride to the E.R., Mr. Freeman? Let them check you out?"

  "No," I said. "I'm all right. Swallowed a little salt water is all but thanks, thanks for helping out. You, uh, know what hospital they're taking that guy to?"

  "Probably North Broward," he said. "Man, I've never seen anyone break bones like that in the surf. That guy was messed up."

  "Yeah," I said, "he was."

  When I stood I could see up over the Royal Flamingo's bulkhead where the group of women whose call for help had set me off was talking with a uniformed Broward sheriff's office deputy. One of the women pointed to me and the cop looked up. I didn't recognize him. He was writing on a pad that looked like a reporter's notebook and the pages were flapping in the wind. I started toward the bottom of the stairs as he passed out cards to the women and by the time I reached the top he was heading for me.

  "Excuse me, sir."

  I stood near the shower and waited.

  "Excuse me, I'm Deputy Cardona. You are the rescuer?"

  He was a young man with a tight Spanish accent but his English pronunciations were careful.

  "Sure," I said, offering nothing more and looking down at my soaked pants, now covered with a crust of sand from sitting wet on the beach.

  "The ladies there," he said, tipping his pen back toward the group, which had not moved. "They say they were calling for help when they saw the gentleman in trouble and then you came flying in from nowhere and into the water."

  "Yeah, a real Superman," I said, not really meaning to be a smart-ass but coming off that way while
I was trying to piece together the sight of the smashed bungalow, Rodrigo's broken bones and whether I wanted to talk about any of it with this cop.

  "OK. First of all, I will require a name, sir," the officer said and raised his pen to his pad.

  "Max. Max Freeman. Look, do you mind if I shower this stuff off?" I said, dropping my fingers to my pants and nodding at the shower. He said, "Not at all, please," and stepped back to the windward side and let me turn on the water.

  I let the stream run over my head and kept my eyes closed while I thought of what I was going to say to the guy. I rinsed the sand off my pants as best I could and when I couldn't stall any longer I cranked the valve shut. The cop stood patiently by, looking out to sea and then to the bulkhead, and if he was perceptive enough he would pick up the deep impressions that my landing on the beach had made and then follow my running footsteps leading back to the bungalow. The door was still wide open.

  When I stepped away from the shower one of the ladies was there with a towel.

  "Thank you," I said, caught off guard.

  "You were marvelous," she said. "That man owes you his life."

  I started to say something but she held up a palm and then walked away to join her friends. I turned back to the cop, raised my eyebrows and then motioned to the chickee hut nearby.

  "Can we sit?"

  I picked up the shirt I'd tossed on the ground when I'd bolted for the ocean and pulled it over my head. I ducked under the dried fronds that formed the roof of the open shelter and took a chair facing my bungalow so that the officer's back would be to it. It didn't help. He was perceptive.

  "You live here, Mr. Freeman?" he said, pointing the pen over his shoulder.

  "Actually, it belongs to a friend. I was just borrowing it for a while."

  "Was the drowning man your friend?"

  It figured that I'd get one of the bright ones.

  "Why do you ask?" I said. It was one of those sophomore techniques; answer a question with a question. He checked his notebook.

  "One of the ladies, she says she saw the drowning man limping down to the beach and saw him go into the water with his clothes on."

  No question had been asked, so I didn't respond. I used the towel to dry my hair and avoid eye contact.

  "She also says a larger man who appeared to be chasing him came down these steps with anger and with a baseball bat in his hands."

  David, of the infamous Hix brothers, I thought. I could picture him in the bungalow, taking down the dining room light with a single swing.

  "The limping man appeared to escape into the water because the other refused to follow."

  I draped the towel around my neck and then stretched out one leg and reached into my pants pocket. The cop did not tense. He had already seen me without a shirt and knew I wasn't carrying.

  "Do you mind if I make a call?" I said and pulled a dripping cell phone from my pocket but then looked dumbly at it when I saw that the power button brought no light or noise.

  Cardona seemed patiently amused. He reached into his own shirt pocket and took out an even smaller cell phone and handed it to me.

  "I will take it that the call is local?" he said.

  I nodded my assent and dialed a number while he watched.

  "Lieutenant Sherry Richards?" I said for the cop's benefit when she picked up on the other end.

  "You stood me up, Max," she answered.

  "No. I've had an unexpected emergency up here, Lieutenant," I said, loud enough for the deputy to hear.

  "Are you OK, Max?" she said and the concern sounded real.

  "Uh, yeah, there's already an officer here at the scene," I said, and Cardona was now looking into my face.

  "What scene are you talking about?" Richards said, now letting worry creep into her voice. I ran through what I figured had happened, that Rodrigo had been tracked by David Hix, who saw his chance to impress his ugliness on the little man and scare him out of the country. I talked loud enough for both Richards and the cop next to me to hear. He looked skeptical.

  "Here, I'll let, uh, Deputy Cardona explain," I said and handed the officer his own phone. He turned away and I looked out at the whitecaps, hoping the concern I'd heard in Richards's voice meant she wasn't so pissed at me that she would leave me swinging. After a minute, Cardona snapped the phone shut.

  "The lieutenant says she wants you down at your prearranged meeting place, asap, Mr. Freeman."

  "I think this will go much better this way," I said to him, and without another word I went inside to change my clothes.

  CHAPTER 29

  On the drive to the Galleria in Fort Lauderdale I called Billy on the cell and told him about Rodrigo.

  "How is he?" was his first question.

  "Broken leg and maybe the same for his arm," I said. "Probably with the baseball bat."

  "Hix?"

  "No doubt on the loose," I said.

  "Max, how did they find him? How did Hix know about the Flamingo?"

  It was the more difficult question. There was no way bat man was sophisticated enough to be extrapolating cell phone signals. It took expensive equipment to pull that off and he and his brother just didn't come off with that kind of juice. Since Billy had been the one who picked Rodrigo from his last hospital visit in West Palm and drove him to the beach house, the only guess I had was that he'd been followed. He was an attorney, not a street investigator. He could have led the Hix brothers straight to the place where he thought Rodrigo would be safe. But I wasn't going to put it on him.

  "I'm not sure, Billy. But he's in North Broward Hospital now, and I doubt he'll be going anywhere soon."

  "So you're there with him?"

  "Ah, not right now," I said, the admission sticking in my throat. Billy had put me on the cruise worker case. He expected certain things from me. I was letting him down by chasing after Morrison and O'Shea.

  "I'm driving down to meet with Richards now," I said. "She took a report from the deputy at the Flamingo and I'll ask that they put a guard on Rodrigo's door. He's been the victim of the same attacker twice now, it's gotta pull some protection."

  My excuse sounded lame. Billy let it sit there in my mouth, forcing me to taste it by not answering.

  "OK, Max," he finally said. "I hope, my friend, you know what you're doing."

  Me too, I thought and punched off the cell.

  When I met Richards in the parking garage, I wasn't in the mood for any more questions or some pissing match over O'Shea. She said he'd called her, after all this time trying to avoid all contact with "the bitch." The last time I talked to him he said he wanted to help me find the truth about Morrison before any internal investigators got in on the rape charge, a charge that Richards would want to file as soon as she found out.

  When I pulled up to her unmarked car she got out and walked around to stand at my door. She was in jeans and a collared blouse with a cotton jersey underneath. Her detective's shield was clipped to her belt and her 9mm was in a holster on the other hip.

  "We going on a raid?" I said in greeting.

  "I'm not sure what we're going to, Max."

  I got out and leaned back against my closed door. She crossed her arms. The ball was in her court.

  "O'Shea called me at the office," she started. "It was nearly midnight but he talked dispatch into giving me his cell number by telling them he had information about the missing girls I was tracking."

  I nodded my head. At midnight O'Shea would have been on the stakeout of Marci's apartment for several hours. Long enough to do some thinking.

  "When I reached him he was cryptic as hell. Told me he thought you were getting in deep chasing down Morrison and that the only way he figured he could really help you was by coming out with the truth."

  I couldn't react. It was too much to grind. I could still feel the sand in my shoes from pulling a guy out of the ocean, a guy I should have been guarding. I was less than twenty-four hours from getting caught trying to tail a cop, a cop who might be guilty of
multiple homicides.

  "So what's the truth?" I said.

  "That's where we're going, Max. He gave me an address," she said, pulling an orange "While You Were Out" message note from her pocket. "He said not to get there until after two. He told me it would be safe and in fact kind of begged me not to bring anyone but you. He said bringing you would be proof that it wasn't some kind of setup that would be dangerous."

  I looked around in the garage like I was searching for the SWAT boys.

  "And you're going to trust him?"

  "You did, Max," she said.

  We took her car and I rode shotgun. The address was a few blocks to the north along the Middle River. She was nervous. I knew because she always had to talk when she was nervous.

  "So tell me about the scene at the Flamingo," she said.

  I told her the story in more detail, how Rodrigo had somehow slipped out of the bungalow and took his chances in the water.

  She stopped at a light to cross Sunrise and rolled down the window.

  "I'd have to agree with Deputy Cardona," she said. "Those spots of blood on the walkway would make me nervous, too."

  I shook my head and told her that from the impressions left in the walls and the descriptions that the women gave Cardona, it had to be David Hix.

  "This is your union-busting guy? The one who took on you and O'Shea in the alley with his brother?" she said.

  I nodded and then told her about the photos and the threats that Billy and Diane had received at their home and the additional photo of the Fort Lauderdale attorney.

  "You do know how to get your nose into the shit, Max," she said.

  "It is a talent," I said.

  She cut her eyes at me and I thought I could see a smile play at the corner of her mouth. I took advantage of the moment.

  "And since Mr. Colon has been attacked twice by this baseball bat-wielding felon, can we get an officer to watch his room over at North Broward Medical Center?"

  She looked over at me and then picked up the radio. She made the arrangements with dispatch, only asking me the spelling on Rodrigo's name and then checking a computer screen attached to the dash in front of her and finding the case number.